Back to the future

For a long time, I didn’t know that the jolly old gentleman with the hearty guffaw who visited us every weekend wasn’t actually related to my dad.

Besides being a quick wit and a fantastic raconteur, Tauji also had quite a way with words, and taught me some uncommon ones (bric-à-brac, complete with the grave accent on the a, was the first). He gave me my first dictionary too, a hard-bound Chambers Children’s Learning Dictionary, with stiff glossy pages and colourful illustrations — an irresistible treasure for a geeky six year old who, if you believed my parents, would one day feed books to his children instead of food. I even remember that visit to Tauji’s family in Kanpur one school vacation, whose high point was being allowed to handle a prized family heirloom — a real sword, its glint dulled with age but its steel still lethal, stained and streaked with what I imagined with morbid fascination was real blood.

Years later, when I discovered that Tauji (honorific for dad’s older brother) wasn’t really my dad’s older brother, but only his boss at work, it came as quite a letdown. I should have known that, I thought in chagrin, given that my dad usually called him “Boss”, even at home. I’d assumed then that that was just an affectionate term for an older brother, but now it made sense — and I had the very disquieting feeling that I was really quite dense for not having figured it out sooner.

While I can claim to have built such deep, familial friendships only rarely, I’ve certainly been fortunate that many of my own friends are those whom I first met at work. Indeed, the best times of my professional life have been those spent working together with friends, chatting and laughing, sharing deep thoughts and deeper sorrows, exchanging confidences, receiving comfort. Work has the annoying habit of creeping up and consuming you, but you can always let your hair down if you have a friend or two around to lighten up with.

Which is why it’s a bittersweet feeling to be saying goodbye now, after almost ten years. Ten years is a long time — and when it strikes you that ten years is nearly a quarter of your life, and that you’ve therefore spent at one company alone almost one-fourth of the entire time you’ve been alive, you can only gape in astonishment at just how long ten years actually is! And while it was about the work, surely, it was just as surely about the people . . . about the camaraderie, the banter, the walks after lunch . . . about the life stories and the personal anecdotes . . . about the friends made . . . and the friends lost. Rest in peace, Ron Aghababian.

Although it is time to move on, there’s a definite back to the future feel to it. In a serendipitous twist of fortune, I shall be working again with a good long-time friend. We started our careers at the same time, in the same team, and we built some great software together. I’m quite looking forward to an encore.

So, to all the folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with these past ten years, goodbye . . . until we meet again. Thank you for all the good times.

Au revoir.